Literary dreams can be tiresome in the extreme, their presence a tic beloved of self-indulgent writers and promptly skimmed over by readers. Dreams of Speaking is, unsurprisingly, riddled with reverie. As its title hints, airy layers of imagery rather than any cohesive narrative dictate the novel's progress.

Gail Jones is an Australian writer who won acclaim for her Booker longlisted second novel Sixty Lights, a meditation on photography. Dreams of Speaking has now been longlisted for the Orange Prize. This is a work that reads more like the prose experiment of a poet than the structured composition of a novelist and thus, after much grappling for narrative handholds, the reader's only choice is to give in to the flights of metaphor with few expectations of landing on solid plot.

Alice is an Australian writer who likes to travel. She is writing a book called The Poetics of Modernity, in which she studies "the unremarked beauty of modern things, of telephones, aeroplanes, computer screens and electric lights ...". Her quest takes her to Paris where she meets Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb, who has collected tales of 20th-century inventors. In Alice's loneliness, the much older Mr Sakamoto is both soulmate and the perfect intellectual counterpart; she eventually follows him to Japan, where she has to face a tragedy.

This is the outline of a story that acts as a device on which to hang internal monologues, philosophical discussions, accounts of technology, and, above all, elaborate descriptions. Having just arrived in Paris, "her body was strung out, in another time zone, still operating in the reverse logic of a cross-planetary biology, but she felt alert, excited. Travel, rush through space, was her self-enchantment. Relocation into new co-ordinates. Forfeited certainties. The erotics of strangeness. She couldn't bear the persistence of the known into stale habituation."

An academic consciousness tinted by the language of cultural theory often nudges through the poetic musing but, ironically, it is in Mr Sakamoto's sparse chunks of biography that the book's real poetry lies. His illuminating tales of invention are quite beautiful, and they, along with some less clotted scenes from childhood, provide welcome ballast and showcase the writer's lyrical abilities far more successfully than her over-excited flights into the purple.

This is a novel suspended from a theme, eschewing many conventions, but though there's a definite sense of the author striving towards a European sensibility, towards the nouveau roman even, Jones is no Sarraute or Duras: her poetic experimentation requires much tightening to be as beautiful as it needs to be. She is infinitely better in starker Australian mode, framing some startling images in spare prose when she writes of whales and childhood landscapes. The more she tethers herself to a touch of reality, the less precious she becomes. The novel ends with a hint of the writer's own awareness of this: "Alice had spent her day in words, evading the real; now the physical world asserted its substance."